So given all this on Carr, his biography, his fiction, what are we to make of him as a Fortean?
In a word: it was an incarnation. One of his many. He adopted Forteanism in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the same way he had adopted Bohemianism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. That’s not to say it was all posing, stripped of real emotion. If there’s one thing we can say about Carr’s early life, it is that he acted out his beliefs: he became a writer, became a Bohemian, became a Communist who travelled to Russia, and became a Fortean.
He joined the Fortean Society in the 1940s, likely after the publication of Fort’s omnibus edition in 1941. Thayer referenced him in 1943, and his friend E. Hoffman Price was contributing to Doubt in 1945 and 1946. But Carr did not start to put his Forteanism into action until 1946, when he moved to New Mexico and attempted to set up a lamasery somewhat like the New Age mecca established by M. Doreal in Colorado. The lamasery was based in an old tavern in Gloriette, New Mexico, “on a dead-end road in a dying forest beyond a ghost town beside an abandoned cemetery,” he said. Carr quoted Robinson Jeffers: “I have found my rock.”
The lamasery failed, but Carr continued his Forteanism in his writing. The first example is “Morning Star,” which was published 6 December 1947 in The Saturday Evening Post. (This was the same year that Robert Heinlein famously broke into the slicks by having four stories published in The Saturday Evening Post.) Carr himself crowed, it was the “first Fortean novelette the staid Satevepost ever printed (and all unwittingly, be sure)” while Thayer announced in Doubt 20 (March 1948), “The Saturday Evening Post has taken up Fort! In the issue of December 6, old style, MFS Carr had the feature spot with his tradition-shattering novelette, Morning Star, conceived in Forteanism and dedicated to the proposition that thinking can be made painless, even thrilling: and in the column, Keeping Posted, our Worshipful Lama to the Fortean Tibet did a bit of missionary work.”
It’s not clear, exactly, what makes the story Fortean—and it is very clear that the Post recognized Carr’s Forteanism. As Thayer suggested, it was a focus of the biography on Carr published to accompany the story. It read, in part:
“Can It Rain Blondes?
“The author of the Carr Theory that Venus is inhabited exclusively by thousands of beautiful, love-hungry women, Robert Spencer Carr, is a devoted follower of the late Charles Fort, and a member of the Fortean Society. To the Forteans, Carr’s novelette, Morning Star, on Page 18, will not seem curious in the least. The Forteans, like their founder, enjoy speculating on such wonders as rains of frogs, visitations of mice and strange lights in the skies. It was Fort’s belief that in laying down its solemn rules, science has turned a determined back on a great many things that don’t fit the rules. Fort seemed to feel that the same forces causing a rain of frogs in London, or a rain of fishes in Seymour, Indiana, might someday cause a rain of Swedes on the star Vegas or a rain of Poles on Pluto. Carr’s beautiful traveler from Venus arrives in pretty sedate fashion, by those standards. Carr could have had a rain of beautiful girls and still have stayed well within Fortean possibilities.
His pretty traveler would not have made much of a trip, either, is another of Fort’s speculations is correct. Fort thought it entirely possible that this is a stationary world, as stationary as a white-collar worker’s pay, and in a rather small shell, so that the stars are nowhere so far as generally supposed. Along about 1950, he thought, interplanetary travel might become commonplace, and the night sky full of neon advertising signs.
Shortly after Carr’s novelette reached this office, the author was pleased to read in The New York Times a quotation from an associate professor of astrophysics at Yale. That learned gentleman said it is possible that men from Mars—if not babes from Venus—already have visited the earth. He seemed to think that just because they didn’t stay is no proof they weren’t here; they may not have liked the joint. “Unless they spent some time in a large city,” he said, “or landed sufficiently recently to be photographed, we would have no record of their having been here. Any few men who had seen them probably would not be believed.
We think the learned doctor is off the beam in thinking the Martians would be noticed more readily in a large city. On the contrary, a few Martians more or less wouldn’t make any stir at all. “Well, drop dead,” the visitor says, “I’m a man from Mars Three hours late passing the moon, but we made it up. Get excited.” Three out of five would take it as a publicity stunt for a forthcoming movie, the fourth would put the Martian down as just another big-city crackpot, and the fifth would walk on muttering about those People Will Do Anything radio shows.”
The biographical bit doesn’t really explain the Forteanism of the story, either, except to the degree that any speculative science story is Fortean. Adam Roberts, the science fiction writer and historian, makes a similar kind of argument in his history of the genre, but this seems an especially generous understanding for Forteanism. And, if true, Heinlein’s would have been the first Fortean story in the Post.
It was while Carr was in New Mexico that he worked on his novel The Room Beyond, which seems to have been especially important to him (as well as to his friend E. Hoffman Price, who said he read it every couple of years.) And here we get a sense of what Forteanism meant to Carr—not just anything speculative, but a bridge between science and mysticism. The book was an attempt to solve certain metaphysical problems that bothered Carr, especially the nature of life after death. Carr belonged to that group of Forteans who saw Fort in spiritual terms. At least in the 1940s and 1950s. Science fiction, he said, was “the Passion Plays of the Atomic Age”: “Modern science is transforming today into tomorrow at such amazing speed that who dares say where fact leaves off and fantasy begins. At this moment, your tax money and mine is being spent by Government scientists on rocket projects aimed in the direction of” those stories.
And that is most clear from his best story, and also his most Fortean, “The Coming of the Little People,” published November 1952 in Blue Book. It was also the last of his short stories—the last of any of his published stories—though perhaps not his last story. “The Coming of the Little People” concerns a series of Fortean events that occur on high mountain tops. Carr explicitly connects these to the idea of Fortean phenomena, mentioning rains of frogs and such. But in this case, the Fortean phenomena have a spiritual explanation: they are caused by the little people—the fairies, the incarnate life forces of the earth—rebelling against humanity’s mad dash toward atomic death. Fortean events, then, were the spiritual world speaking to us—whether in terms of a women who seemed immortal, or fairies bringing about world peace—or even a Venusian goddess who wants to bring sexual pleasure to earth men.
Thayer had a more dyspeptic view of Carr’s work. He announced The Room Beyond in Doubt but saw it as rooted in pulp traditions:
“MFS Robert Spencer Carr, author of Morning Star, which many read in the Saturday Evening Post, has a new book for your Fortean shelf. It is a streamlined approach to the theme of Rider Haggard’s She. From the Society, $3.00”
And when Sputnik was launched, and the world shocked by the first orbiting satellite, Thayer argued it was all a hoax—and that Carr may have been one of those who helped propagate the hoax: or at least ready the world for it. In a rambling screed for Doubt all about “Sputs”—and the hoax that was conning the world—Thayer attacked Carr, among others:
“One of these days the conscience of some key figure in Washington will force him to confess all, or Forrestal out a window, and then perhaps we shall know whether Walt Disney has been cooperating with Washington or merely making another million with his space-travel cartoons, whether MFS Kenneth Arnold was cooperating with Washington or merely liked to see his picture in the papers, whether MFS Carr and the Saturday Evening Post were cooperating with Washington or merely catering to a new public when Carr’s lady from Venus landed in those sacred pages and made science fiction respectable at last, whether Major Kehoe had the the blessing of his superiors or was valiantly daring them to jerk his braid, whether David Dietz and all his coterie of syndicated science writers were cooperating with Washington or merely filling their columns.
“It will be interesting to read the answers to all those questions eventually, but we do not point the finger. The statement is merely that science fiction, the saucer data and the professional press-agents for Science have been the major conditioners, battering our brains out.”
By this time, though, Carr had left Forteanism behind, moved to Florida, and became a teacher. But he did have one last Fortean trick up his sleeve; one last story to tell.
Anyone know what happened on 8 July 1947? Walter Haut, public information officer for Roswell (New Mexico) Army Air Field, announced that a flying disk had been recovered. The report made the news, but was later discredited by another military announcement: that only the remains of a weather balloon had been recovered. Carr was living in New Mexico at the time, about two hundred miles away. He most likely heard about it, but if he wrote about it nothing has come to light since then. We do know, though, that he was intrigued by an article in the 22 June 1947 New York Times which quoted Yale astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer saying that it was possible Martians had already visited Earth.
And it wasn’t only Carr’s writings—if such existed—that were forgotten. The entire Roswell, New Mexico, incident dropped out of the public conscious, including among ufologists and flying saucer enthusiasts. Well, that’s probably not exactly a fair assessment. There did continue to be comments related to the incident. But there is no doubt it was not the cause célèbre, it would one day become. In 1974, Carr started speaking publicly about a flying saucer crash that had occurred in New Mexico in 1947 or 1948. His story was similar to one told by Frank Scully in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. But Carr added the detail that alien bodies had been recovered and necropsied.
Carr’s statements were one of the events that relaunched interest in Roswell—not the only one, maybe not even the most important reason, but certainly an important one. And so his Fortean interest in flying saucers and visitors from other planets became a foundational part of current flying saucer culture.
In a word: it was an incarnation. One of his many. He adopted Forteanism in the late 1940s and early 1950s in the same way he had adopted Bohemianism in the late 1920s and early 1930s. That’s not to say it was all posing, stripped of real emotion. If there’s one thing we can say about Carr’s early life, it is that he acted out his beliefs: he became a writer, became a Bohemian, became a Communist who travelled to Russia, and became a Fortean.
He joined the Fortean Society in the 1940s, likely after the publication of Fort’s omnibus edition in 1941. Thayer referenced him in 1943, and his friend E. Hoffman Price was contributing to Doubt in 1945 and 1946. But Carr did not start to put his Forteanism into action until 1946, when he moved to New Mexico and attempted to set up a lamasery somewhat like the New Age mecca established by M. Doreal in Colorado. The lamasery was based in an old tavern in Gloriette, New Mexico, “on a dead-end road in a dying forest beyond a ghost town beside an abandoned cemetery,” he said. Carr quoted Robinson Jeffers: “I have found my rock.”
The lamasery failed, but Carr continued his Forteanism in his writing. The first example is “Morning Star,” which was published 6 December 1947 in The Saturday Evening Post. (This was the same year that Robert Heinlein famously broke into the slicks by having four stories published in The Saturday Evening Post.) Carr himself crowed, it was the “first Fortean novelette the staid Satevepost ever printed (and all unwittingly, be sure)” while Thayer announced in Doubt 20 (March 1948), “The Saturday Evening Post has taken up Fort! In the issue of December 6, old style, MFS Carr had the feature spot with his tradition-shattering novelette, Morning Star, conceived in Forteanism and dedicated to the proposition that thinking can be made painless, even thrilling: and in the column, Keeping Posted, our Worshipful Lama to the Fortean Tibet did a bit of missionary work.”
It’s not clear, exactly, what makes the story Fortean—and it is very clear that the Post recognized Carr’s Forteanism. As Thayer suggested, it was a focus of the biography on Carr published to accompany the story. It read, in part:
“Can It Rain Blondes?
“The author of the Carr Theory that Venus is inhabited exclusively by thousands of beautiful, love-hungry women, Robert Spencer Carr, is a devoted follower of the late Charles Fort, and a member of the Fortean Society. To the Forteans, Carr’s novelette, Morning Star, on Page 18, will not seem curious in the least. The Forteans, like their founder, enjoy speculating on such wonders as rains of frogs, visitations of mice and strange lights in the skies. It was Fort’s belief that in laying down its solemn rules, science has turned a determined back on a great many things that don’t fit the rules. Fort seemed to feel that the same forces causing a rain of frogs in London, or a rain of fishes in Seymour, Indiana, might someday cause a rain of Swedes on the star Vegas or a rain of Poles on Pluto. Carr’s beautiful traveler from Venus arrives in pretty sedate fashion, by those standards. Carr could have had a rain of beautiful girls and still have stayed well within Fortean possibilities.
His pretty traveler would not have made much of a trip, either, is another of Fort’s speculations is correct. Fort thought it entirely possible that this is a stationary world, as stationary as a white-collar worker’s pay, and in a rather small shell, so that the stars are nowhere so far as generally supposed. Along about 1950, he thought, interplanetary travel might become commonplace, and the night sky full of neon advertising signs.
Shortly after Carr’s novelette reached this office, the author was pleased to read in The New York Times a quotation from an associate professor of astrophysics at Yale. That learned gentleman said it is possible that men from Mars—if not babes from Venus—already have visited the earth. He seemed to think that just because they didn’t stay is no proof they weren’t here; they may not have liked the joint. “Unless they spent some time in a large city,” he said, “or landed sufficiently recently to be photographed, we would have no record of their having been here. Any few men who had seen them probably would not be believed.
We think the learned doctor is off the beam in thinking the Martians would be noticed more readily in a large city. On the contrary, a few Martians more or less wouldn’t make any stir at all. “Well, drop dead,” the visitor says, “I’m a man from Mars Three hours late passing the moon, but we made it up. Get excited.” Three out of five would take it as a publicity stunt for a forthcoming movie, the fourth would put the Martian down as just another big-city crackpot, and the fifth would walk on muttering about those People Will Do Anything radio shows.”
The biographical bit doesn’t really explain the Forteanism of the story, either, except to the degree that any speculative science story is Fortean. Adam Roberts, the science fiction writer and historian, makes a similar kind of argument in his history of the genre, but this seems an especially generous understanding for Forteanism. And, if true, Heinlein’s would have been the first Fortean story in the Post.
It was while Carr was in New Mexico that he worked on his novel The Room Beyond, which seems to have been especially important to him (as well as to his friend E. Hoffman Price, who said he read it every couple of years.) And here we get a sense of what Forteanism meant to Carr—not just anything speculative, but a bridge between science and mysticism. The book was an attempt to solve certain metaphysical problems that bothered Carr, especially the nature of life after death. Carr belonged to that group of Forteans who saw Fort in spiritual terms. At least in the 1940s and 1950s. Science fiction, he said, was “the Passion Plays of the Atomic Age”: “Modern science is transforming today into tomorrow at such amazing speed that who dares say where fact leaves off and fantasy begins. At this moment, your tax money and mine is being spent by Government scientists on rocket projects aimed in the direction of” those stories.
And that is most clear from his best story, and also his most Fortean, “The Coming of the Little People,” published November 1952 in Blue Book. It was also the last of his short stories—the last of any of his published stories—though perhaps not his last story. “The Coming of the Little People” concerns a series of Fortean events that occur on high mountain tops. Carr explicitly connects these to the idea of Fortean phenomena, mentioning rains of frogs and such. But in this case, the Fortean phenomena have a spiritual explanation: they are caused by the little people—the fairies, the incarnate life forces of the earth—rebelling against humanity’s mad dash toward atomic death. Fortean events, then, were the spiritual world speaking to us—whether in terms of a women who seemed immortal, or fairies bringing about world peace—or even a Venusian goddess who wants to bring sexual pleasure to earth men.
Thayer had a more dyspeptic view of Carr’s work. He announced The Room Beyond in Doubt but saw it as rooted in pulp traditions:
“MFS Robert Spencer Carr, author of Morning Star, which many read in the Saturday Evening Post, has a new book for your Fortean shelf. It is a streamlined approach to the theme of Rider Haggard’s She. From the Society, $3.00”
And when Sputnik was launched, and the world shocked by the first orbiting satellite, Thayer argued it was all a hoax—and that Carr may have been one of those who helped propagate the hoax: or at least ready the world for it. In a rambling screed for Doubt all about “Sputs”—and the hoax that was conning the world—Thayer attacked Carr, among others:
“One of these days the conscience of some key figure in Washington will force him to confess all, or Forrestal out a window, and then perhaps we shall know whether Walt Disney has been cooperating with Washington or merely making another million with his space-travel cartoons, whether MFS Kenneth Arnold was cooperating with Washington or merely liked to see his picture in the papers, whether MFS Carr and the Saturday Evening Post were cooperating with Washington or merely catering to a new public when Carr’s lady from Venus landed in those sacred pages and made science fiction respectable at last, whether Major Kehoe had the the blessing of his superiors or was valiantly daring them to jerk his braid, whether David Dietz and all his coterie of syndicated science writers were cooperating with Washington or merely filling their columns.
“It will be interesting to read the answers to all those questions eventually, but we do not point the finger. The statement is merely that science fiction, the saucer data and the professional press-agents for Science have been the major conditioners, battering our brains out.”
By this time, though, Carr had left Forteanism behind, moved to Florida, and became a teacher. But he did have one last Fortean trick up his sleeve; one last story to tell.
Anyone know what happened on 8 July 1947? Walter Haut, public information officer for Roswell (New Mexico) Army Air Field, announced that a flying disk had been recovered. The report made the news, but was later discredited by another military announcement: that only the remains of a weather balloon had been recovered. Carr was living in New Mexico at the time, about two hundred miles away. He most likely heard about it, but if he wrote about it nothing has come to light since then. We do know, though, that he was intrigued by an article in the 22 June 1947 New York Times which quoted Yale astrophysicist Lyman Spitzer saying that it was possible Martians had already visited Earth.
And it wasn’t only Carr’s writings—if such existed—that were forgotten. The entire Roswell, New Mexico, incident dropped out of the public conscious, including among ufologists and flying saucer enthusiasts. Well, that’s probably not exactly a fair assessment. There did continue to be comments related to the incident. But there is no doubt it was not the cause célèbre, it would one day become. In 1974, Carr started speaking publicly about a flying saucer crash that had occurred in New Mexico in 1947 or 1948. His story was similar to one told by Frank Scully in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. But Carr added the detail that alien bodies had been recovered and necropsied.
Carr’s statements were one of the events that relaunched interest in Roswell—not the only one, maybe not even the most important reason, but certainly an important one. And so his Fortean interest in flying saucers and visitors from other planets became a foundational part of current flying saucer culture.
